Adaptive Rollout Truncation Based on Epistemic Uncertainty for Efficient Offline World Model Training

Abstract

Accurate neural world models are central to model-based robotics, where they enable robots to predict future states from previously observed trajectories. Multi-step autoregressive training improves long-horizon prediction, but fixed rollout horizons also increase computational cost and can amplify early training errors when the model is still inaccurate. Existing training schemes typically use the same rollout length throughout optimization, independent of the model's current predictive reliability. We propose an epistemic uncertainty-driven adaptive rollout strategy for offline world model training following an auto-curriculum training scheme. Instead of always unrolling to a fixed horizon, the model terminates autoregressive rollouts once epistemic uncertainty exceeds a threshold calibrated from a warm-up phase. We study two uncertainty estimators: a five-head ensemble with a shared recurrent backbone and Monte Carlo Dropout. A two-stage warm-up procedure stabilizes uncertainty estimates before we enable adaptive truncation. Experiments on ANYmal-D and ANT show that ensemble-based adaptive truncation matches or improves the prediction accuracy of fixed-horizon training and the RWM-U baseline while requiring substantially fewer cumulative rollout steps. Training a world model on ANYmal-D following the presented approach reaches comparable final performance with the baselines with roughly 72% less rollout computation. These results indicate that epistemic uncertainty is useful not only for downstream policy regularization, but also for making world model training itself more compute-efficient.